Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  “Do you get up to London much?” my wife asked.

  “When I need a haircut,” Vidia said.

  “But you must miss your London house,” I said.

  “It’s over. I have been paid. It’s in the bank. My ‘house money,’ I call it.”

  “We’d love to move. All our things are in storage,” Pat said.

  That explained the starkness of The Bungalow, the small bookcase, the few pictures, the bed-sitter atmosphere.

  “Where to live?” Vidia said. He raised his arms in the Italian way. “Where?”

  My wife said, “Swinging London.”

  “London does not swing for me,” Vidia said. “This is serious, man. Where can one live? Tell me, Paul. Do you think I should live in America?”

  “You might like it. You said you liked New York City.”

  “I have been thinking of something wild, someplace rugged. Mountains. Large tracts of land.”

  “Montana?”

  “Montana! I shall go to Montana.”

  “Cold winters,” I said.

  “Lovely.”

  “Snow. Ice storms. Blizzards.”

  “I adore snow. I adore dramatic weather.”

  “What about me?” I asked. “Where should I go?”

  Vidia was never flippant. He frowned, he thought a moment, he stopped eating. “You must make your name here,” he said. “Forget America for the moment. It’s just depressing. The display of ego. The Mailer business. Roth—the sour grapes of Roth. And what these people don’t understand when they praise Hemingway and Fitzgerald is that Hemingway and Fitzgerald are bad writers, man. Bad, bad!”

  My wife said, “I quite like Tender Is the Night.”

  “Bogus emotion. Bogus style. All forced. His letters to his daughter are excellent—no bogus display there. Just a father addressing his daughter. But his novels say nothing. And all this nonsense about his wife.”

  “Zelda,” my wife said.

  “She was crazy,” Vidia said. “Out of her mind.”

  “Oh, Vidia,” Pat said, beginning to scold.

  “I am explaining to Paul why he will find a greater degree of appreciation of his work in England. He does not indulge in bogus displays of ego.”

  “I am not talking about that,” Pat said.

  “Can I pass anyone the salad?” I said.

  “Zelda,” Vidia said. “I am so bored with the self-dramatization of the female soul. It is really just a way of pleasuring the body.”

  “She wrote a novel, Save Me the Waltz,” my wife said.

  “I am speaking in general, not about any particular book. I am speaking about this bogus feminism, the way it makes women trivial-minded.”

  My wife said quietly, “Women are trying to liberate themselves from traditional roles that have confined them. That’s why a job—”

  “Women long for witnesses, that is all,” Vidia said. “Witnesses to their pleasure or their distress.”

  “Vidia, do stop,” said Pat. “You are being such a bore.”

  He smiled and said, “Why are women so obsessed with their bodies? Men are like that in adolescence, but these women are adults.”

  “A lot of women are unhappy, I suppose,” I said.

  “No, no. Deep down they are very happy. Give them their witnesses and they will be even happier.”

  My wife had fallen silent.

  Pat said, “I have a lovely apple pie that Mrs. Griggs made.”

  Vidia said, “Where is Griggs? I haven’t seen her today.”

  “She’s got the brasses today at the church. There’s a christening, one of her nieces. She’s polishing the brasses.”

  “I won’t have any pie, thank you,” my wife said.

  “Coffee then,” Pat said. “Now Vidia, go into the parlor. I won’t have you ranting.”

  “What are you chuntering on about?” Vidia got up from the table. “Paul, let’s try some snuff.”

  Again I was acutely aware that Pat and my wife had been left behind to clear the table and make coffee. I made an attempt to help, but Pat waved me away. She said, “Vidia has been dying to see you.”

  He showed me how to take snuff. I tried several flavors, tapped some on the back of my hand and snorted it, and I sneezed explosively.

  Vidia did not sneeze. The snuff vanished into his nose. He could not explain the anticlimax. He just laughed. Then he and I went for a walk to the old water meadows, and he explained how they had been made. He had become acquainted with the shrubs, he knew the names of the wildflowers, the different grasses, and even the trees that were dead and covered with ivy. He knew which were oaks and which were yews and which were ash. He talked a bit about his landlord, but in the most respectful way; he mentioned the Skulls.

  “There isn’t time to go to the Henge,” he said. “But you’ll come again, won’t you?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “We’ll walk to Stoners.”

  It was growing dark: the November dusk, which seemed to rise from the ground like the vapor of night, brimming and blackening; not a dying light but a dark tide of mist that made you think you were going blind at three o’clock on an English afternoon in late autumn.

  Using the bathroom back at The Bungalow, I saw that, as in London, Vidia and Pat had separate bedrooms. I knew it from glimpses of certain books and clothes. They were the sort of bedrooms that suggested insomnia and loneliness.

  “We must go,” I said.

  “Please have some tea,” Pat said. “And there’s cake.”

  We had tea and plates of fruitcake, and I tried Mrs. Griggs’s apple pie. Vidia speculated about Montana. He said he would be going to Trinidad in the new year. When we put our coats on he said, “It is so good to see you. You’re going to be all right.”

  “Come back and see us again,” Pat said.

  In the darkness outside, I heard Vidia whimper. Then he said, “I don’t want you to go. I’ll be depressed after you leave.”

  “Vidia,” Pat said in a soothing voice.

  He looked small and blurred in this rural darkness, and the wall of Wilsford Manor made the darkness greater, like a door closing behind us.

  It was dark the whole way—no streetlights on these country roads. My wife was silent, ruminating.

  “You said they were so happy,” she said after a while. “I don’t think they’re happy at all.”

  “Aren’t you glad we came?”

  “Yes. I pity Pat, but I’m glad I saw her. I never want to end up like that.”

  She was silent all through Wiltshire and well into Dorset. In the lights of Dorchester she seemed to waken, and she spoke again.

  “But he isn’t interested in me.”

  “He is.”

  “He never once asked me what I did. He didn’t ask about the children. Just you two, the boys, talking about their writing.”

  “I think Vidia feels awkward around women.”

  “No, not awkward. They irritate him. He dislikes them. He mocked Zelda, and what does he know about her? He mocked feminism. That could mean he’s madly attracted to women but that he hates the thought of it.”

  In the six years I had known Vidia, I had never thought about him in this way.

  “Never mind,” my wife said. “He’s your friend, not mine.”

  Back at The Forge, I buried myself in my novel, Saint Jack. I also wrote several book reviews a week, one for the Washington Post, one for The Times. But the money was poor. I began to live on my small savings. My wife said, “See?” I was hopeful I would sell Saint Jack and be solvent again. I had applied once more for a Guggenheim. A letter to me at The Forge said that I had been turned down. Why did it bother me so much that the Guggenheim Foundation had spelled my name wrong in their letter of rejection? I complained to Vidia.

  “Be glad they turned you down,” he said. “Those foundation grants are for second-raters, people playing with art. You don’t need them. You’re going to be all right.”

  We spoke by phone. At the age of thirty, I had
my first telephone. The Bungalow was a long way by road from The Forge—hours of winding roads and country lanes clogged with tractors, slow drivers, elderly cyclists, and herds of cows. But we were on the same railway line, the Exeter Line to Waterloo. My nearest station, Crewkerne, was just over the county line in Somerset; Vidia’s was Salisbury.

  Winter had come. A housing boom in London meant that we would probably never be able to afford a house there. Never mind, I was happy to stay in the countryside, working all day, kids at the nursery school in Beaminster, up at the pub at night playing bar billiards. I marveled at the farm laborers who drank in the pub. They were full of vicious opinions and xenophobia. “I says to the bugger, ’Well, you can fuck off back to where you come from.’” One day there was news that a party of children on a school trip had become lost in a sudden snow squall in the Cairngorms, and seven of them had frozen to death in the snow.

  Old Fred, sitting by the Gollop Arms fireplace, said, “Serve ’em right. When I was at school we never went on these fancy trips to Scotland.”

  Every two weeks I took the train to London, turned in a review, sold my review copies for cash at Gaston’s as Vidia had done five years before, had lunch, mooched, walked the streets, and got a late train back to Dorset. Dinner on the train: “More roast potatoes, sir?” The lights flying past, villages twinkling in the blackness.

  “Let’s have lunch in London,” Vidia said during one of our phone calls.

  “What about Wheeler’s?” We’d had lunch there on my first visit to London. It was the only restaurant I knew, and even so I avoided it, because of the expense.

  “The Connaught is better,” Vidia said. “Although many of your fellow countrymen eat there, it really is quite satisfactory. Shall we say the Connaught?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “You’ll have to book it,” he said.

  He met me on the train, boarding the 9:50 to Waterloo, which I had boarded an hour and a half earlier at Crewkerne. Yeovil, Sherborne, Gillingham, Shaftesbury, then Salisbury, where he appeared on the platform, a small, dapper man with thick black hair, wrapped up against the cold—muffler, collar up, gloves—yet looking exotic, almost a spectacle, a small Indian in Salisbury station in 1971, all the English people towering over him and deliberately not seeing him. Nor did he take any notice of them.

  Seeing me, he nodded and looked relieved. He slid the compartment door open and took a seat opposite. The other passengers averted their eyes, which made them look even more attentive. A tall man I had seen boarding at Sherborne, probably from the school there, was holding a small faded clothbound book close to his face. He was not reading but listening, for Vidia had already started to speak to me.

  “Paul, Paul, you have something on your mind. I can tell.”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “Your wife is not happy. I have a vibration.”

  “She wants to get a job.”

  “Good! Earn a few pence.”

  “What about you? How’s things?”

  “I have a broken wing,” he said. It was his usual expression for exhaustion and near collapse. But he explained. “For the past fifteen years I have been driven by an enormous tension.” He stiffened and grimaced in illustration, and then he went limp. “I am now so exhausted that the act of creation scares me. I’m tired. I’m idle. Insomnia, man. But look at you. Full of ideas, writing your novels. Tell me, who are you seeing in London?”

  I told him.

  Vidia said, “But he is no one.”

  I mentioned another name.

  Vidia said, “Who is he? Is he anybody?”

  I told him a third name.

  Vidia said, “Bogus, man. All bogus. They do not exist.”

  “They’ve been pretty good to me—I mean, giving me work.”

  “Of course. You do your work. You are busy. You have ideas. But these people will draw off your energy. After you see them you are very tired, aren’t you?”

  “I suppose so.” But what did that prove? After I saw Vidia, I was very tired too, and sometimes my head hurt, my brain feeling nagged at.

  “They are sucking your energy.”

  At the word “sucking,” the schoolmaster from Sherborne in the corner seat glanced up from his book, then quickly covered his face with it.

  “They will destroy you,” Vidia said. “They are playing with art. I’ll tell you a story. The first man you mentioned”—out of delicacy, Vidia did not repeat his name—“he has no gift, yet he wrote a novel. ‘I am a novelist’—the big provincial thing. He is from a rural area. He wrote his bogus novel. Just playing with art. He wrote another—farmers, provincials. But he is in London. He is bringing news. He begins to move in grander circles, still playing with art. His provincial wife is very unhappy. She thinks he is a genius. She doesn’t know he is playing with art. He is caught with another woman. It is his right. He is an artist, a novelist, he can do such things. But his wife is in despair. She kills herself. Why?”

  Now the schoolmaster was frankly gaping and so was I.

  “Because he played with art.”

  Green fields, greener than the summer fields of Africa, and clumps of trees moved past the windows, a bouncing belt of scenery. Crows flew up.

  “Don’t play with art.”

  We stopped at Andover. No one got off. The last seat in our compartment was taken by a woman who seemed startled when I spoke.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “I see In a Free State everywhere.”

  “Do you? I’m afraid I have no interest in that.”

  “It’s sure to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.”

  “Prizes are such a con. I think the Americans have the right idea. Sell the book, don’t go looking for prizes.”

  “I mean, you were so prescient about the East African Indians being thrown out.”

  “The book is important.”

  “I wonder what they made of it in Africa.”

  “Tommy McCoon wouldn’t like it.”

  The man in the corner seat looked up again.

  “But it’s a big book.”

  A large, neat sign lettered Stop Coloured Immigration was painted on the stonework under a bridge near Basingstoke.

  Vidia stared straight ahead. “And you booked a table at the Connaught. Oh, good.”

  At Waterloo the compartment emptied fast, and as we were leaving I saw on the seat the faded book the man I had taken to be a schoolmaster had been reading. Yes, I had been right in guessing he was a schoolmaster. The book was Cicero’s Select Orations, a Latin text, no name on the flyleaf but many pencil marks in the margins.

  “We’ll take it to Lost Property,” Vidia said.

  On the way to Lost Property, Vidia recited an imagined dialogue between the book’s owner and someone else. It’s gone, I’m sure of it. Then, Have a look at Lost Property. Someone might just have turned it in. And, Couldn’t possibly. Then, Do let’s look. There’s just a chance...

  We left the book with the clerk who sat among all the umbrellas and sinister-looking parcels.

  Vidia had books to sell. We made the circuit: a taxi to Gaston’s, the tobacconist for Player’s Navy Cut, the newsagent, then a taxi to the Connaught, in Carlos Place. It puzzled me slightly that I had paid for both taxis.

  The doorman at the Connaught was dressed in a top hat and a dark caped ulster with green piping at the seams. He had a red face and side-whiskers. The porter was mustached and alert; he wore a frock coat and striped trousers. There were fresh flowers in a vase near the entrance. The etched mirrors gleamed. All these Dickensian touches were distinct signs that the Connaught was expensive.

  We were met at the entrance to the Grill Room and shown to a table. The waiter was subservient in the bossy English way—that was a bad sign too. We were given menus. Vidia asked for the wine list. He pinched his glasses to get the right angle and looked at the list with serious concentration for a full minute. Seeming to have found the right bottle, he looked up at me.

  �
�You will do well here,” he said. “Michael Ratcliffe is very pleased with your reviews.”

  Ratcliffe was the literary editor of The Times.

  I said, “I hate doing them.”

  “They force you to make a judgment on a book. It’s important to reach conclusions. Most people have no idea what they think of a book after they’ve read it.”

  The sommelier came over to us. He was dressed in black and wore a chain around his neck and could have passed for a mayor wearing the gold insignia of his office. He saw Vidia with the wine list.

  “Have you made a choice, sir?”

  Vidia said to me, “Let’s get a real wine. Let’s get a classic. A white burgundy.” He put his finger on his selection. “Number seventy-eight.”

  “Very good, sir. An excellent choice. Shall I bring it now?”

  Vidia nodded. The sweating silver bucket was set up and the bottle opened, the cork sniffed. It was a Puligny-Montrachet. Vidia sipped some and worked it around his teeth.

  “It’s good,” he said. “So many flavors. The roots of these vines go very deep. It gives complexity—taste the chalk?”

  I sipped it. Was that what chalk tasted like?

  “What was that name again?” I asked. I picked up the wine list and, pretending to examine the name, I glanced at the price. It was eleven pounds. The review I was about to turn in would net me ten pounds.

  “The roots of your California vines are much shallower, because of the rainfall. It’s not bad—different virtues. Savor their differences. These French wines have deep roots.” He sipped again.

  A beef trolley was wheeled over. It contained the Thursday “luncheon dish,” boiled silverside. Vidia waved it away. Thinking that it might offend him if I chose meat, I looked at Poissons. The menu was mostly in French.

  “The English recruit people,” Vidia said. “That is not widely understood. They often take on new people. They make room. It is not exclusive—it is selective.”